Skinwalker
by Mis Chi Evous
Summary: What does the Harry Potter fandom need more of? Zombies, pirates and ghosts, of course! Harry and Ginny use their holiday to help an old friend solve a centuries-old mystery in Aberdeen. Written originally for the takingitinturns Keeping Secrets Fest.
1. Chapter One: Persuasion

**Chapter One: Persuasion**

_Scotland, February 1819_

The wind tossed the seas until they frothed and beat against the cliffed shore passionately, chipping away at the land with the patience of the ages. The sky cracked apart with a bolt of lightning and the ground rumbled with the thunder that followed it. A lone figure made his way across the treacherous terrain, cloaked from head to toe in a thick black coat. A brimmed hat cast off most of the rain, and his thick boots squelched through the mud.

"Bloody inconvenient, this," he muttered, hopping down onto a rock and nearly losing his balance. "It's because I've got no spine. No spine at all, that's what Mum used to say."

A flash of lightning made his path visible, which was a blessing because the torch he'd brought was nearly useless in the torrential downfall. He was making his way down the cliffs by sheer luck and the familiarity of the journey.

"Here I am, middle of a bloody monsoon," he continued, "tramping across bloody Scotland because some tosser with a hat says to me 'Watch the treasure, Smit'. I've got to get a spine."

The wind picked up, tossing Smit's coat about him, and he cursed, pushing it down and glaring at the ground, not daring to lift his head for fear the wind would take his hat, as well.

"Awk!" the bird on his shoulder squawked. "Bloody eejit! Awk!"

"Stuff a bloody sock in it, Brie. You're a bloody nuisance, is what you are," Smit said sullenly, but there was a faint smile on his face until he came to the spot marked on his map. Whistling cheerily, he stuck his head in the cave first and called out brightly, "Oi, anyone here?"

"Rum! Rum for a Sickle!" the parrot chimed in helpfully.

"Someday, I'm going to stuff you. See if I don't," Smit said, turning to the parrot and glaring as menacingly as he could manage. Jumping down into the tepid water that was at the base of the cave, he took a few steps into the entrance before his torch extinguished. "Dammit," he muttered.

The water sloshed over the top of his boots and Brie let out an indignant squawk, flapping his feathers as ice-cold water dripped from the ceiling.

"One of these days, I'm going to get a job working for a bloke who plans better," Smit said wistfully. "Someone with an eye towards retirement."

Brie whistled. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," he advised.

"Right. That's helpful," Smit said, shaking his head. "Right useless. I've said it before, and I'll say it again."

Feeling his way along the cave wall with nearly-frozen fingers, poor Smit was upon it before he realized what happened to him, for the cave opened into a cavernous room with a pool of water in the center of it. He nearly fell in, cursing and pushing against the wall until he found his balance.

An eerie sound, like bones grinding together, rumbled from the bottom of the basin. Brie's claws dug into Smit's shoulders, but the bird, it seemed, was too terrified to make a noise.

"This is not good," Smit said. "This is not good at all."

From the water, a hand with stringy skin broke the surface, followed by a forearm, and then an elbow...

Smit screamed, and took off running.

_London, February 2000_  
Harry Potter woke that morning to the pleasant sight of Ginny Weasley, wrapped around his pillow. Her mouth open slightly, she snored and drooled and hogged the covers, but for the moment, she was the most perfect bed partner he'd ever had.

The sun was barely up, but he reached for his glasses and wiped them against the material of his pillowcase before the world came into focus. With a sigh, he laid back in bed, his hands folded on his chest. His feet stuck out from the end of the blanket, mostly because Ginny had twisted it around her body and there wasn't enough material to cover him, too.

There was a scratch at the window, and so he swung his frozen feet off the bed onto the floor and padded over to the window, opening it for an official-looking owl, who hooted impatiently as it landed on the dresser, extending its leg so that Harry could unwrap the message.

"Shush," he said quickly. "No need for Ginny to wake up. Be quiet, and I'll grab you a treat, yeah?"

This seemed to placate the beast, who rolled its neck and settled with dignity on the perch Harry kept in the bedroom for just this purpose. He was rising up the ranks in the Auror Department quickly, and it wasn't unusual for several owls to interrupt his sleep a night.

"Harry?" Ginny's voice was groggy, interrupting his frantic search for an owl treat among his things.

"Yeah, Gin. It's me. It's nothing, go back to sleep."

"It's nothing?" She sat up and glared at the owl. "_Harry._"

"What?"

"You're on _holiday_." Ginny threw the blanket off her body and tromped across the bedroom, wrapped in one of Harry's old Gryffindor t-shirts, and pointed her finger at the offending creature. "Harry Potter is on holiday," she said firmly. "And so am I. You go tell your superiors that they can stuff a bloody sock in it because I've had it up to here with this shi..."

"Ginny?" Harry held out a hand, reading through the message. "This one might be different."

"Different how?" Ginny put a hand on her hip.

"Do you want to go to Scotland?" Harry wriggled his eyebrows at her.

"Scotland? Harry, we went to school in Scotland."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "Why, so we did."

"And, if you don't recall, it was bloody miserable this time of year. Cold, windy, rainy..."

Harry pointed out the window. "It's cold, windy and rainy right now, Ginny."

"Yes, but it's cold, windy and rainy in _London_. Why would I want to go to Scotland?"

"They've had a bit of a local flair-up. Neville thinks I might want to poke my nose into it."

Ginny bit her lip and took a deep breath. "What kind of local flair-up?"

"The fun kind." Harry beamed at her. "No dark wizards, Ginny. No dark creatures. Just a local Muggle legend about the ghost of a pirate haunting the cave."

"So we'd be going to..."

"Poke around a bit," Harry said, crossing his fingers behind his back. "See if there's any truth to the rumor, get the poor bloke registered if he's there, see what's what... and, you know. Be a tourist."

"In Scotland?" Ginny chewed on her nail. "Well, I suppose... that'd be cliff-climbing and such, right?"

"Absolutely." He wriggled the piece of paper at her. "Want to come with?"

"Well... what could be a better vacation than cliff-climbing, looking for the ghost of a pirate?"

"And I'll be there," Harry said, his voice deepening, wrapping his arms around her and kissing the back of her neck. "We could rent, you know. A cottage or something."

Ginny couldn't help it, she laughed. "Or we could get a hotel room, so they'll do our laundry."

Harry's attention had turned to a particular spot on her neck that turned her knees weak. "There you go, always thinking of things that I'd forget about... that's why you've got to come with me."

"You just want to shag me in Scotland."

"I want to shag you everywhere."

The owl hooted impatiently, startling Harry and Ginny, who jumped apart like guilty children. It ruffled its feathers and tapped at the window.

"Right. Treat and then off you go," Harry said, tossing the bird a brown nugget and letting it fly out the window. "Where was I?"

"Convincing me to go to Scotland," Ginny said, pulling him close to her again. "Convincing me to use my very valuable holiday time to traipse about the country with you, probably getting bruised and bloody and..."

"You'd love every single minute of it," Harry said with a grin. "But if you require persuasion..."

"Oh, I do." Ginny kissed him deeply, walking him back towards the bed. "The kind you're _so_ very good at..."

The wind beat against the glass walls of the greenhouses at Lombart's Nursery School for Young Witches and Wizards, but the lone figure inside of them appeared to take no notice of it. Neville Longbottom tapped one of the lights concentrated on his blooming snapdragons, mumbling under his breath when it flickered on and then off.

Something worried at the back of his mind, but unlike his youth, when he'd had troubled understanding the causes of his anxiety, this one he could name and put a face to – a threat against the very school he'd come to love. In lieu of a posting at Hogwarts, he'd come here just a few years ago, and had fallen in love with the town and the people.

And then he'd learned their secret. A secret he could no more stand than he could stand to see the Carrows abusing Ginny their seventh year. He'd researched in vain, written Hermione Granger and come up with nothing. There was only one person left he felt he could safely ask for help.

"Professor Longbottom?" One of his most gifted students, Lonnie, a young girl of nine, stood in the doorway, holding a piece of paper. "This just came from you. It's from Mr. Potter, sir."

He grinned. "Really?"

"Do you think he'll agree to help?" Lonnie worried at the hem of her skirt. "You said he'd help, if you asked him to..."

"Harry's as good a man as you've heard," Neville said quickly, opening the envelope and scanning the message quickly. "And he's as good a man as I thought."

"He's coming?"

"Yes," Neville said quickly. "I can't say with certainty that he'll know what to do, Lonnie. But I can say that he'll certainly give it his best shot, which is better than most people do their entire lives."

"Do you think I can meet him?"

"I'll certainly take him 'round to say hello," Neville said, dropping the envelope on his desk and going for his cloak. When he turned, it was almost as though he were a different person. "Now, Lonnie. Run home, tell your mum there's hope that it'll be over soon. I've got to get a message to Ginny about the state of the hotel in this town. It's very likely they'll want to stay with me."

Lonnie nodded, and watched with wide eyes as her quiet, reserved professor morphed before her eyes into someone with broader shoulders and world-weary eyes. Her classmates whispered that Professor Longbottom had been a great war hero, but until she'd seen him just now, she hadn't believed it.

She snuck over to the desk and took a peak at the magic-gram that had exercised such an influence over Professor Longbottom.

_Got your message stop Understand urgency stop Will bring Ginny and meet you at Apparition point outside Aberdeen stop No worries stop Potter's on the case stop_

Lonnie smiled slowly, and began her journey home, for the first time in a while, felt the weight of the world lift off of her very small shoulders.


	2. Chapter Two: From Ghosties and Ghoulies

**Chapter Two: From Ghosties and Ghoulies...**

Apparating with baggage was something of a feat, and Harry had never quite shaken the feeling that he was going to splinch himself at any minute, so it was with great relief that they landed at the Apparition point outside of Aberdeen. The city in the distance, Harry and Ginny brushed off their cloaks.

"I told you it would be windy and rainy and bloody cold," Ginny said sourly, but she perked up when she noticed a figure walking quickly towards them. "Is that Neville?"

"Yeah, he's going to get us to the school. Apparently it's quite a bit up the coast." Harry waved a wand over his trunk, and it rose slowly off the ground and began to follow him.

"It is sort of beautiful," Ginny said, turning around and surveying the sight in front of them. It was early morning, and the ground was covered in a hazy fog. The chill was visible – little flakes of ice coated the grass – but there was a beauty in the desolation.

"Hello!" Neville's voice was cheery against the dreary morning.

Harry nearly winced at the bright smile on Neville's face. "How's it going, Neville?"

"Glad to see you, Harry!" He held out a hand and shook Harry's firmly. "I'm really hoping you can help." He held out his arms and Ginny stepped into them, hugging him and smacking his cheek with a kiss.

"Hello to you," she said. "We're glad to see you, too. We'll be happy to help out."

"I don't know much about the origins of the story," Neville said without preface, "but everyone in town is getting more and more nervous."

Ginny raised her eyebrows at Harry but addressed her question to Neville. "About a ghost?"

"It's not just a ghost. The story's a bit... complicated," Neville said, gesturing down the road. "Shall we walk and talk?"

"Absolutely," Harry said, but he was scanning the area with his eyes. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. He was starting to get a feeling about this -- a feeling that things were about to go bad.

"Neville, would you excuse us for a minute?" Ginny's voice was saccharine-sweet.

Neville smirked and looked at the ground. "Yeah. I'll just take a walk in that direction." He pointed away from the couple.

"Thanks. It won't take a minute." Ginny whirled to face Harry, her hair following her in a delightfully distracting way. "You're in Auror mode. This is more than a lark. You tricked me."

"Tricked is such a... loaded word," Harry said, waving his hand. "I prefer the term..." Ginny waited. "Well, actually, tricked is a pretty good word."

"Why?"

Harry shrugged his shoulders. "You were just dead-set on me having a proper holiday and I didn't think you'd be in favor of me, you know. Running off to Scotland to help track down a zombie... ghost... thing."

"I should kill you." Ginny reached in her pocket and pulled out a band, whipping her hair into shape viciously. "I should just... urgh." She threw her hands in the air and then grabbed his hand. "Listen. You're Harry Potter. I knew what I signed up for when we moved in together, yeah?"

Harry felt his ears go red and he swallowed. "And what exactly was that?"

"Self-sacrificing heroics, a work ethic that can be extremely annoying, commitment issues..."

Harry laughed. "I sound like a real catch."

Ginny shrugged her shoulders. "Well, you're good in bed."

"Just good?" Harry asked, moving in to kiss her. "That's not what you said last night...."

Ginny covered his lips with her hand. "Groveling."

"What?"

"You've got at least an hour of groveling time before you get to kiss me again." Ginny turned and walked towards Neville.

"Hey, who makes these rules?" Harry called after her. "I'd like to have a conversation with her!"

"She's not listening to you until you've done the groveling."

Harry sighed and waved a wand over Ginny's trunk, and both trunks followed him as he rushed to catch up to Ginny and Neville.

"Everything all right?" Neville asked.

Ginny linked her arm through his. "Everything's all right. Why don't you tell me and Harry why we're here, exactly?"

**

The jump rope slapped against the concrete slab rhythmically. "Cinder-ella dressed in yell-a went upstairs to kiss her fell-a," the girls in the school yard sang, "made a mis-take and kissed a snake. How many doc-tors did it take? One, two..."

The fog of morning crept over their play, but they ignored it. They'd grown up in a perpetual haze, living so close to the sea. In the center of the rope, Elsbeth Dougal bit her lip in concentration. Mary Louise had just reached thirty-six doctors, and Elsbeth's goal in life was to do better than Mary Louise. Her braided hair flapped up and down to the rhythm of her jumps.

She was on twenty-seven doctors when it happened. A scream on the other side of the school yard, where the older girls were "playing" – an activity that seemed to involve a lot of gossiping about the boys and being too cool to join in on the jump rope songs or the games of footie the boys were playing on the green – broke her concentration and that of the girls swinging the rope for her. Elsbeth tripped and the girls dropped the rope, so she watched what happened next in abject horror from her vantage spot, face down on the concrete.

From the fog, a figure emerged. Bony, with pieces of flesh hanging off of it, it was clear that at one time, it had been been human. The schoolyard erupted, teachers and students fleeing from the horror of the sight.

Whatever it was, it looked from side to side as though it could see, but there were no eyes, only holes that seemed as deep as the skull itself. Elsbeth tried to find the courage to hide from its gaze, but she found herself frozen to the spot. A hand tugged on her elbow, quietly insistent.

"Elsbeth, come on," a voice whispered in her ear. "We've got to run before it gets us. That's the skinwalker."

"It's not time," Elsbeth muttered. "He's early: it's not time."

"Don't think he cares about that," Mary Louise Parker said, yanking her up off the ground. "Elsbeth, we've got to run!"

Then it opened its mouth and screamed – at least it sounded like a scream, a cacophony of screams, and with Mary Louise Parker's hand on her elbow and the sound of that motivating her, Elsbeth found the courage to push herself off the ground and run for the school.

**

"It's a local legend with some basis in fact," Neville was saying as he made tea for Harry and Ginny in his quarters. "It's pretty complicated, with some different variations on the origins of it, but basically what it boils down to is that once a decade, the skinwalker comes and takes a little girl."

"Once a decade?" Harry raised his eyebrows. "We don't have a record of anything like that in the Auror department. I did some research on this area. There's basically nothing there."

Neville shrugged his shoulders. "I've always gotten the impression that the local people seem to take it as a matter of course. It gets to be that time, and they do everything they can, but they don't really expect to stop it."

"And we're approaching the decade?" Ginny asked, grabbing the milk from the refrigerator and adding a splash to her cup. She passed it to Harry without thinking, and added some, tasted, and made a face before adding some more.

Neville smiled faintly at the sight but said nothing about it. He was sure that neither one of them were interested in the observation that they were already an old married couple. "Yes, we're approaching the decade mark. The headmaster is adamant that it's only a local tale, and that this year everyone at the school will be safe, but..."

"You don't believe him," Ginny said softly.

"These people are scared." Neville stood up and brushed the sweat off the palm of his hand. "These people live on the cliffs of bloody Scotland. They've got nerves of steel. But whatever this is, it's got them scared."

"That's got weight," Harry said, rubbing his forehead. "Have you been able to figure out anything about this skinwalker... what it looks like, anything like that?"

"It's apparently bad luck to talk about it," Neville said, shrugging his shoulder. "But then, Harry Potter asking questions might be slightly different than Professor Longbottom asking questions."

"Unfair advantage," Ginny teased, bumping Harry with her shoulder until he smiled.

"It's got some advantages," Harry said quietly. "Neville, is there something going on outside?"

Neville paused. "What? Why?"

"Because I think I hear..."

There was a pounding at the door, and Ginny rushed to open it. A frightened Lonnie stood in the doorway. "Professor Longbottom! The skinwalker's in the schoolyard!"

Harry grabbed his wand and ran past her without thinking, Ginny on his heels, Neville right behind her.

Once outside, it was easy enough to locate the creature. It seemed purposeless, like it was wandering without an aim. Swiveling its head from side to side, it screamed eerily but didn't approach the building.

Harry gripped his wand, prepared to approach it until Ginny's hand grabbed his elbow. "Do you think it's got rules?"

"What?"

"Like with vampires, how they can't come inside unless you invite them?"

The creature turned and faced Harry and Ginny, its mouth closing, somehow managing to convey an expression of glee without any flesh on its face at all.

"No idea. Question," Harry said as he advanced, Ginny right behind him.

"Yeah?"

"Why do they call it a skinwalker if it hasn't got any skin?"

"Better question," Neville said.

"Yeah?" Harry asked.

"What are we going to do to stop it?"

"Oh, I dunno. Something like this." Harry bent down to the ground and side-armed a stone at the creature. It struck the side of its skull with a resounding crack but didn't stop it.

"Great plan, Harry," Ginny said sarcastically. "What's your next idea?"

"_Sectumsempra_!" Harry shouted. The slicing curse severed its spine immediately, the creature looking stunned before it fell to the ground. "I thought I might rip it in half. You'd be surprised how often that works."

Neville swallowed. "Do you suppose it's safe to approach it now?"

"No idea. Don't get any closer. I want to see if it twitches first," Harry said firmly.

Ginny took a few cautious steps forward, ignoring him. "Harry, this creature looks human." With her wand, she poked at something on the body until her face went ashen. With trembling legs she bent down and took a closer look at it.

"What is it, Ginny?" Harry rushed forward, and his face went pale, as well. "Shite on a stick."

"What?" Neville rushed forward, his face decidedly green, as though he might lose his lunch at any second. "Ugh, it smells vile."

"She." Harry rose to his feet, a locket in his hands. "She was a she... once. Either that or she steals jewelry from her victims."

"She didn't seem to have enough intelligence to do that," Ginny said quietly. "So... she was a..."

"I think the lay term is 'zombie'," Harry said. "Reanimated corpses are seriously bad news. I might be in over my head. I've got to get ahold of Hermione."


End file.
